The key trends for customer service 2012
Published on: October 11, 2011
Last Friday’s Eptica International Customer Service Summit in Paris provided a perfect opportunity for 200+ Eptica customers, partners and staff to review current and future developments in the customer service market.
As part of his presentation, Paul Barnes, managing director of Eptica UK Ltd, outlined ten key trends that the company sees driving the market in the near future. These are based on discussions with customers, analysts and Eptica’s own research and development pipeline and can be split into two groups – five that are consumer driven and five led by companies. Top 5 consumer driven trends:
- Access Anywhere - consumers are demanding the ability to access customer service wherever they are, on whatever device they choose
- Access Everywhere – the days of funnelling everyone to a single source of information is over. Consumers expect to be able to access multiple sources of information, from your website through social media to your internal experts
- Personalisation – choice is paramount. Customers want to be able to choose whichever channel they like, not to be forced down particular channels by companies
- Continuity – if they do change channels, customers demand that it is simple and seamless with all their history following them
- Social – customers are keen to see what their peers think about your products and customer service quickly and easily
Top 5 provider/company driven trends:
- Social media – companies are looking at how they manage content and engage with their customers through social media
- Voice of the customer – a growing number of companies have launched initiatives that use customer feedback to ensure they are delivering the right products and services. Combining customer service systems and natural language text analysis can deliver feedback that is both comprehensive and easy to analyse
- Knowledge management – companies want to be able to capture and provide consistent knowledge across multiple channels
- Single view of the customer – no matter how a customer contacts you, companies want to be able to bring all relevant information together to provide a holistic customer view
- Unified desktop – customer service agents currently have to sign into multiple applications to do their jobs, so providing a single, unified and integrated login is vital for productivity
Clearly plenty for customer service directors and their teams to look at moving forward and a good start point for planning for 2012 and beyond. There’ll be more from the Eptica Summit in further blog posts later in the week.
Categories: Contact Center, Customer Service, Email Management, Mobile, Multichannel Customer Service, Social CRM, Self-service
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